Sleep and Its Unsung Role in an Academic Environment

Often in today’s time, we fail to see sleep’s importance in our personal and student life.

Sleep, as we are constantly learning through modern research, should be thought of as a silent hero with more power than we give credit for. In Greek mythology, sleep is even given its own personification in the cunning god Hypnos, who was known for his trickery and role in the Trojan War. Sleep is without a doubt powerful, but we are quick to cut it short in exchange for longer hours out on the town or behind our various electronic screens. If sleep was a superhero, he would be the one to swoop down, save the city from its woes, but be ultimately ignored from those he saves as they ignorantly brush him off and carry on with their morning cup of coffee. .

To that end, I designed this photo series to shed some light on some of the ways in which sleep functions and how we as a people can improve our sleep habits in an educational environment and beyond. .

The Dangers of Sleep Deprivation on the Striving Student

A college student’s close relationship with sleep deprivation should raise some serious health concerns. While an average student might think about the effect sleep deprivation has on their academic performance, they might not think about the effect their accruing sleep debt has on their personal health.

On top of negatively affected cognitive function, a lack of sleep can lead to a lowered immune response, lowered antibody response to an influenza vaccination, and a reduction in cancer-filling natural killer (NK) cells (Walker).  In addition, chronic sleep deprivation puts an individual at risk for type-II diabetes and obesity.  If a person were to sleep for four hours per night for five days in a row, their glucose tolerance levels would be impacted enough to qualify as “pre-diabetic.” 

So even if you don’t notice the short term detrimental effects of sleep deprivation on your academic performance, there is a chance that the long term effects can cycle back around and have an effect on short term academic performance. In light of this, it may be an academically strategic move in both the short and long term to set aside more time to sleep in our busy schedules.

The Cognitive Benefits of Sleep: Procedural Motor Memory Boost

The next time an instructor or coach tells you to “get some sleep” after a rough assignment or practice, you may want to take it seriously.

A study conducted by Walker et al. found that sleep has a highly significant effect not only on procedural memory consolidation, but also on motor skill improvement (2003).  The test showed around a 20% increase in motor skill speed regarding a finger-tapping task after a 12 hour period of sleep, which significantly surpassed groups that instead had a 12 hour period of wakefulness between tests. 

The study showed that this cognitive benefit only arises in slow wave sleep in the last quarter of the night—a sleep period that is at a high risk of disturbance due to an alarm clock set too early in the morning.  Forcing yourself to wake up too early in the morning, whether due to a school or work obligation, may be robbing your brain of potential groundbreaking or game-changing cognitive benefits.   

I would also argue that Lebron James’ three NBA championships and his self-reported average of 12 hours of sleep a night is not a coincidence.

Sleep and Memory Consolidation

As a student with a busy schedule, deciding to sacrifice sleep in order to study flash cards may seem like a beneficial move, right?

Well, not exactly. Research has shown that sleep is not only beneficial for memory, but absolutely necessary in order to have effective memory recall in the future. Sleep can be thought of as protection against forgetting, and trends in sleep research seem to point to the idea that it may be more beneficial to your academic performance to sleep the night before an exam rather than pull an all-nighter. It has been known for quite some time that declarative memory consolidation (probably the most beneficial in an exam setting) correlates with both quality and quantity of non-REM slow wave sleep (Jankins and Dalenbach 1924).

So is it worth it to stay up all night studying, staring your groggy self in the mirror on the day of an exam? For the most part, the answer is no.

Furthermore, it has been shown that there is about a 24 hour window period in which you must sleep in order to retain information (Walker). If you are sleep deprived on the first night after learning something new, the memory detriments can be seen even days after that event.

Sleeping to Gain a Boost in Creativity

It has been well documented among creative minds that sleep “thinking” and dream states can create products that the waking brain is simply incapable of.

Without sleep, the world may never have read about the gothic legend “Frankenstein” or heard the peculiar guitar rift of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” as both Mary Shelley and Keith Richards both attribute their respective artwork to dream-state inspiration. If we, both as students and as creatives, rob ourselves of sleep, we may not reach our full creative potential, and the world may be missing out on great artistic and technological advances.

During sleep, our brains also work hard to think about problems and tasks that we may have come across earlier in the day, but the way in which this happens is the important part in this process. In a pattern-recognizing task, individuals experienced higher inference skills after a 12-hour sleep period that was unparalleled when compared to other control groups, such as those who had 20 minutes and 12-hour waking periods in between test periods (Ellenbogen et al. 2007)

The research seems to show that during sleep—REM sleep in particular—the brain works to generate a “big picture” idea of the outside world, making neural connections that are entirely unable to be made in waking states.

The Science of “Beauty Sleep”

Sure, the idea of “beauty sleep” is well known, but to what extent does beauty actually correlate with sleep?

An experimental study conducted by Axelsson et al. had 65 untrained observers rate 23 healthy individuals on perceived health, tiredness, and attractiveness scales (2010). The 23 individuals were photographed once when they were well-rested, and once when they were significantly sleep deprived. The observers then rated the 23 individuals’ photographs.

The research showed significantly lower ratings across all three categories for individuals when they were sleep deprived verses when those same individuals were well-rested. The research seems to show that individuals are more keen on picking up on “sleep related facial cues” than we may think, and this may have unforeseen implications for social behavior (Axelsson et al. 2010).

In a social university environment—or any social context for that matter—sleep deprivation may have more noticeable signals and have a stronger social effect than previously thought.

Ways to Improve Your Sleep

An easy way to improve your sleep is to follow two guiding rules.

The first rule is to create a daily routine and stick to it. To maximize the quantity and quality of your sleep, preparations have to be taken beforehand in order to prepare your body for sleep; this includes minimizing or eliminating the use of drugs, alcohol, and caffeine in the hours before bed and sticking to regular exercise and dinner times. This will strengthen your circadian rhythm and allow your body to be more in tune with with your natural bodily function. This can be hard for students to accomplish, but a small effort made every single day can hopefully improve your academic and personal life for the better.

The second rule is to always maintain a conducive sleep environment. This may be somewhat easier for a student to accomplish, as many of the steps that can be taken do not require a huge change in your everyday routine. Creating a conducive sleep environment means sleeping in a very dark (to avoid throwing off your melatonin regulation) and slightly cold room (in order to optimize your body’s thermoregulation that occurs during sleep). In addition, you need to keep your bed a place solely for sleeping. Minimizing or completely eliminating other activities that you may do while sitting or lying down on your bed, such as browsing social media on your phone or watching television, will ensure that your brain associates the bed as a place for sleep rather than a place for entertainment or other forms of mental processes.

By allocating a little more of your daily energy to ensuring that you get the sleep you need in your personal life, it is near impossible not to see improvements in your academic life as well. College years are supposed to be a time to find yourself and grab the world by the reins, but I see the opportunity to build better sleep habits as an important—if not more important—step in setting yourself up for success later in life.

Concluding Thoughts

In light of how shocking the research on sleep actually is, it is puzzling as to why this information isn’t widespread throughout our schools and workplaces. As a society that pushes towards technology and innovation, we should be more conscious about our health and cognitive function that can get us there.

In February 2017, a senate bill, SB 328, was introduced by Senator Portantino to the California legislature that would bar middle and high schools from starting before 8:30 a.m. statewide. This was a great step in the right direction for sleep research; however, upon arriving on governor Jerry Brown’s desk in September 2018, it was sadly vetoed.

Given, it is a complicated issue. Giving students a later start time would be more in tune with teenagers’ natural sleep patterns, but pushing back school start times would have detrimental effects on parents’ morning routines among other social and economic factors (Gutierrez and McBride 2018).

I ask you today to not only make better choices involving your personal sleep patterns, but to be more conscious overall about how we treat sleep on a larger, social scale. It would also be in students’ interests—as well as the rest of society’s—to support any legislation that would better align humans with their natural biological state. And that, I believe, is the best advice we can take away from sleep research.

Works Cited

Axelsson, J., Sundelin, T., Ingre, M., Someren, E. J. W. V., Olsson, A., & Lekander, M. (2010). Beauty sleep: experimental study on the perceived health and attractiveness of sleep deprived people. BMJ: British Medical Journal (Overseas & Retired Doctors Edition), 341(7786), 1287–1289. https://doi-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/10.1136/bmj.c6614

Ellenbogen, J. M., Hu, P. T., Payne, J. D., Titone, D., & Walker, M. P. (2007). Human relational memory requires time and sleep. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(18), 7723-8.

Gutierrez, Melody and McBride, Ashley. Published September 20, 2018. “Gov. Brown Nixes California Mandate for Later School Start Time.” San Francisco Chronicle. Hearst Newspapers. Web. Accessed November 26, 2018.

Walker, M. P., Brakefield, T., Hobson, J. A., & Stickgold, R. (2003). Dissociable stages of human memory consolidation and reconsolidation. Nature, 425(6958), 616. https://doi-org.libproxy.berkeley.edu/10.1038/nature01930

Walker, M. P. 2018 Psychology of Sleep [Lecture Series, University of California Berkeley].